LeftCoast

The SR-71 was called the "Blackbird", the "Blackhawk" is a helicopter currently in use by most branches of the US military.

LeftCoast

wdog,

The military also tends to live by the rule "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Many of the older systems still do exactly what they were originally designed to do and do it relatively well. They will undoubtedly be replaced eventually, but unless there has been some radical change in their mission that makes the current hardware/software obsolete, there is little pressure to change.

NialScorva

Exactly, but some of the methods I learned to do things are completely different.

Liquidrage

Yup. I thought one thing, typed another.
I spent 4 years in the USAF as a Computer Programmer and have seen one up close. Though never in flight.

Liquidrage

For example?

LeftCoast

Understandable.

They have a decommissioned SR-71 on pylons outside the Air and Space museum in Balboa Park here in San Diego. No engines, but still interesting to look at. The also have one parked at the Air-Museum at March AFB outside of Riverside,CA along with a whole buch of other interesting looking planes (WWII vintage through cold-war) - I've drivin by on I215 and seen it plenty of times but have never had the time to stop at take a tour (that's on my list of things to do, however).

NialScorva

Hrm...

Mostly using technology that's 20 years old to do something very tricky to design, but very effective when there's a 3 year old technology that's rather simple, less tricky, and equally effective.

Liquidrage

Well, as I see it each situation needs to be evaluated on it's own.

The biggest risk the military faces in their oldest systems is lack of hardware to replace broken pieces and lack of developers with experience in older languges and environments.

Some of the military systems are beyond enterprise level software and hardware.
The personnel system in the Air Force is 30 years old. Though it has had several major updates over the course of those years and there are still a dozen full time Cobol programmers on staff for maintenance. It's just too large to follow the rules.

In many cases, such as the supply system for the USAF that was being upgraded to support the F-22's, the military was left to the mercy of the contract team in charge of writing it but never delivered the product despite a million dollars a year for 5 years to write it, plus a 5 year extenstion when they were running behind schedule.

But not to stray, in many cases you are write. It is a good rule of thumb to keep your systems up to date and there are many reasons why. But some of the systems, from my experience, cannot follow this rule of thumb.

Vorkosigan

Aurora

<a href="http://www.area51zone.com/aircraft/aurora.shtml" target="_blank">http://www.area51zone.com/aircraft/aurora.shtml</a>

<a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/mystery/aurora.htm" target="_blank">http://www.fas.org/irp/mystery/aurora.htm</a>

Shake

RE: mix of technology in the military:

After serving nearly 9 years in USAF, I've seen my share of both high-tech, and high-tech for its time. For example, on the same aircraft you could find a GPS system (very new) and components of the interphone (intercom) system that were built in the early 60s!

I remember receiving training on ESD (electro-static discharge) safety and then asking about it in respect to some equipment I was working on and being told, "Oh don't worry about it on this. These are 1st generation ICs. You don't have to be that careful around them." But in other equipment having miniature circuitry that was extremely ESD sensitive. Static electricity, for those of you who don't know, can be the death of today's electronic components.

I worked in Avionics repair, and at my last base we had automated stations that tested the boxes from the aircraft. (Interesting trivia: those "black boxes" you always hear about when planes crash are actually bright orange!) Anyway, these stations were built in the 70s, and occasionally with the newer boxes they'd report errors that weren't really errors because of timing issues. In other words, the stations were too slow to take measurements on the faster equipment that's being built today. They are, finally, beginning to upgrade those stations.

IMO, the SR-71 is the sexiest plane ever built, and remains my all-time favorite! It's just unbelievable how far ahead of its time it was. That always gets me thinking, well, what have they got now? And now, think about this: the F-117 is almost 20 years old!

Another amazing thing to think about, is that current projections still have the B-52 in service for at least 20 more years!!! There are already BUFF (Big Ugly Fat F**ker) pilots whose fathers flew them!